Month: April 2006

<![CDATA[Finally someone in the mainstream agrees with me. There is a section in PC Format magazine that says cooperative play in upcoming games will be a bigger part. Coop gaming, especially in first person shooters is tremendously fun. I spent a lot of time playing Duke Nukem 3D and Doom coop on my PlayStation. Very few games after that supported coop modes (although I realised that it brings some complicated design issues).

<![CDATA[I'm getting a new computer. Well most of a new computer. And I've been considering whether to get Windows Media Centre Edition or not.

The first two versions of MCE were rather lacking but after reading a lot I've decided 2005 is actually quite cool.

What is Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005?

Good question. One I didn’t know the answer to until recently. It’s Windows XP a with range of new utilities for working with video, music and images (as well as bits of hardware associated with them) all wrapped inside one interface. The idea is to have your computer as the hub for your whole home entertainment system.

Digital Video Recording (DVR)

The most useful component is the built in DVR software (sometimes called Personal Video Recorder or PVR). Plug your TV into your TV tuner card and Windows can record stuff straight to your hard drive. But of course most TV tuners come with software to do this. Well MCE does it better to be honest. And you can also get a hardware bundle (ready built systems come with it) that includes a IR blaster. Basically it’s an infra-red transmitter you stick to the front of your set top box (Sky, cable, whatever) to allow your MCE computer to change channels.

Disk space

The lowest quality recording takes up between 1Gb and 1.5Gb per hour. Reasonable hard drives these days are about 200Gb which gives you about 100 hours of video (leaving space for other stuff). Not really suitable for storage but it does allow you to burn things to DVD. Most of the time. The software apparently supports any content restriction specified in incoming media and won’t let you copy such content of the computer that made it.

But it’s still a computer, right?

MCE is actually Windows XP Professional underneath. It took a while to confirm (most references are vague about whether it’s XP Home or XP Pro) but I did find a page on Microsoft’s website saying it’s XP Pro. This means you can do everything with it that you can normally do with a PC.

After doing this it had me thinking about status codes. By default that will generate a 302 Found HTTP status code. A bit of reading led me to decide that 303 See Other was a better response since the request might correspond to a page in the future (and presumably a relevent page) but for now should be redirected. 3XX are somewhat confusing…

Anyway if you want that behavious, add this line too:

header('Status: 303 See Other');

Finally, you should think a little before implementing this since any random page accessed could now be cached by proxy serversand search engines etc. since the server is no longer sending a 404 Not Found code.

I recently bought a book about ASP.NET: Pro ASP.NET in C# by Apress, mainly because when I was looking for jobs there were lots of ASP.NET jobs advertised. And I have to say I have no idea why. Part of the problem may be that is book isn’t very good (there are bits of vague contradictions and a general obsessive (and inaccurate) preachiness about it) but I think there are major limitations to ASP.NET.

Firstly the inability to post to a different page. Who the hell decided that was good idea? I know it can be faked but that’s just silly. And you can only really have one form on a page. Well you can only have one “rich” form that ASP.NET can access in a clever and high level way.

I’m assuming people will disagree with me (if not, why is it so popular). If you do, please explain why ASP.NET is supposed to be so amazing because I don’t see it…

<![CDATA[My computer is now essentially dead. Luckily I have internet access at work and an hour lunch break 😀

It's been getting increasingly unstable for the past month or so giving me random blue screens of death. Sometimes I get a driver reference that caused the problem (and they are different drivers each time) and sometimes I don't. Yesterday it managed to crash while trying to display the Windows log-in screen and I was left with just a cursor on black screen. Since I now have money and it’s old anyway (Athlon 1.2GHz – back when AMD named their processor after their real speed) I’m not so bothered.